The LITA/ALCTS MARC Formats Interest Group will hold its Midwinter meeting at the Dallas Convention Center, Room C149, on Saturday, January 21, 2012, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m.

The discussion topic will be "What Lies Beyond MARC?" The Library of Congress has announced its Bibliographic Framework Initiative, which includes plans to find a successor to the MARC format. Three speakers will share their thoughts on this topic.

One of our previously announced speakers, Mark Ehlert, has unfortunately had to withdraw from this session. However, he has generously offered to share some material covering his planned topic of the relationship between RDA and MARC. A handout will be available at the session and will also be posted online.

We are very grateful to Diane Hillmann for agreeing to step in as a replacement, joining our other speakers Kelly McGrath and Jennifer Bowen.

Kelley McGrath is Metadata Management Librarian at the University of Oregon. Kelley has chaired OLAC's Cataloging Policy Committee, coordinated the OLAC/MLA RDA test group and is currently serving as OLAC's liaison to CC:DA. She will discuss some functionality that she would like to see in a post-MARC format and some challenges for the transition.

Jennifer Bowen is Assistant Dean for Information Management Services at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries. She is currently Chair of the eXtensible Catalog Organization and has served as the ALA representative to the Joint Steering Committee for AACR2/RDA. She will speak about how eXtensible Catalog (XC) can facilitate the transition between a MARC environment and a non-MARC environment for libraries, how XC can inform the development of the new bibliographic framework, lessons learned from manipulation of XML records that represent FRBR Group 1 entities, and XC's potential for producing Linked Data.

Diane Hillmann is one of the managers of the Open Metadata Registry. She will talk about a new and interesting resource that appeared this summer on the Open Metadata Registry: the complete set of MARC Bibliographic properties with URIs, definitions and RDFS (http://marc21rdf.info/). What can be done with that, if anything? Diane will talk about the next steps in 'building up' from the basics.

A short business meeting will follow at the conclusion of the presentations. Expressions of interest are sought for the role of co-chair for this Interest Group.

The presentations by Kelley McGrath, Jennifer Bowen, and Mark Ehlert are available below as attachments. Please note that Mark's presentation includes some revisions to the version previously distributed.